Monday, September 27, 2010

At Left, the king of 70's Blaxploitation. And if I have to tell you...muthafuckah your born-insecure sorry ass don't need to know!

The playlist for this past week's show is such a massive work load for me (as well considering a few other things I'm writing this week, which is really taxing my resources regarding sitting behind a goddamn keyboard) that I really don't feel like writing a big long essay about a show which is, after all, pretty much self-explanatory. What I will say is this: RA#20 was a fucking dense-pack explosion of pure funk-itude, from the opening moments of Riz Ortolani's Mondo extravaganza thru the Italian Giallo thrillers and- of course- the massive amounts of whakka-chukka that made Blaxploitation so much fun. So...download the show and by all means have your very own Mondo Exploitation Psychedelic Dance Party! And if you do...drop me a line and tell me how it went! - TKR

Playlist For Radio Anthrocide#20 Mondo Exploitation Psychedelic Dance Party

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

At Left, an unlikely photograpgh of what appears to be an early Soviet Antonov amphibious transport plane in Himalayan-like climes. Not bloody likely...but a beautiful pic worthy of the Miskatonic University Antarctic Expedition, 1931.

While this week's show was unfortunately cut short by a big-whig pow-wow on the Radio23 Cascade Community Radio network put together at the last moment by corporate potentate y jeffe Jeff Hylton-Simmons, we still managed to pack more insanity into the 120-or-so minutes of RA#19 than most radio programs manage in their entire miserable, low-rent, genuflecting, kowtowing, bow-and-scraping-to-corporate-shitheads lives. Whilst this host refuses to hold himself standard to such impossibly low behavious exhibited by these mainstream cretins, it is worth noting for you who have chosen to follow the RA path: we're only here for a few hours, once a week- but you get more goodness from RA in our time together than you do from the rest of the Internets combined. And it is goodness,my friends- lots and lots of crazed goodness.

The show began with a curioisty for RA- a modern Techno DJ named Li Chin Sung (aka "Dickson Dee") who is making some very interesting Dark Ambient music- interesting enough, in fact, that as I'm listening to the show right now, I am noting how incredibly seamlessly the track "Shame" segued into Brian Eno's "Lost Day", from my very favorite of his Ambient albums, #4, On Land. Whilst the entire show was a "highlight" (in my, admittedly tendentious, view) there were numerous tracks I resolved to say a few more things about come bloggin' time. I am especially entranced with the decidedly evil sounds of Phallus Dei, whose album Pontifex Maximus is just flat-out evil and great. Here is the Mutant Sounds link, and if you are at all disposed to driving yourself insane on late nights when it does appear that the ghosts walk and Satan is about, drunk with his infernal power and prepared to lord it like a scythe over the contemptuous form of man...then these guys are your poison. Also, just go nuts while you are over there at Mutant; those guys are friends of RA (of which I am tremendously proud) and it is the best music blog on the entire Internets.

What goes well with something that sick? Why, RA friends The Black Sun, but of course. I've played these Seattle-based avant-nuttiness Electro freaks before, but it bears repeating: Anthony Passonno and Dean Blake are two talented motherfuckers. They are both multi-instrumentalists, and this track from tonight, "Ghost Procession"- featuring the ghostly presence in the background of Emperor Hirohito offering his surrender speech to a shocked Japan, really emphasizes their ability to creep the living fuck out of the listener. We'll be hearing much more from Mssrs. Blake and Passonno in the future, with possibly an in-studio one of these weeks.

Now for some other friends of RA who I finally got off of my ass and around to playing. Marco Oppedisano is a remarkably gifted Musique Concrete guitarist from Brooklyn, who has a brand new album out called Mechanical Uprising from which I played the track "Solitary Pathways". Marco is a remarkably gifted Musique Concrete guitarist from Brooklyn who has a new album out, Mechanical Uprising. There is a lot to say about Marco, all of it good; his guitar playing is angular and sparse, yet disconcertingly dense when he decides to make some serious noise- like an old Napoleonic maxim about being apart in Space but together in time. You should check him out.And you should also check out Serpentina Satelite,whom I would like to congradualte for their new album,Mecanica Celeste.Dolmo and Renato Gomez are ferociously talented Space-Psych guitarists in the classic mold, who complement each other so well that sometimes I was not sure who had taken the lead role; somewhat Manuel Gottsching, maybe even a little Steve Hillage. But still very much classic Space Rock guitarists, which is very satisfying to these ears, as that is a style that just seems to have died due to lame-ass "jam bands" noodling away to no effect for infernal lengths of time. There were also super rare tape-effects curiosites from post-Soviet era Knocking Bamboo and proto-Electro from Alfred Schnittke, but...we'll have to deal with all of this on a later blog post.

I could on, but I can't go on. So on that appropraitely madly-Beckettian note...here's what I played. See you this week coming, and as always, thanks for the support and...Cheers, - TKR

Sunday, September 12, 2010

At Left, a scene from "The Prioresses Tale", the most endearing of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales"- if you're into that sort of ritual-murder type bloodletting and such. Nothing to do with the show, of course, except a shared name and I needed an illustration for this short essay. Yep, I'm bigtime lazy this week.

Radio Anthrocide is now Legal- albeit Barely- and while this happy turn of events of reaching the age at which men well into their 50's can now legally violate this once pristine flower of austere virginity...very little will change with this raucous whore called RA whom I have guided to her special day with a combination of whipcord discipline and shockingly rebarbative tender mercies. In short, RA is now a big girl- and she'd better to learn to act like one.

The celebration for this special day consisted of four solid hours of Canterbury sounds- and some relatively associated Jazzrock that I really, really like, and- of course- the obligatory oddball moments of strangeness without a home. While most of this music should be very familiar to the kind of person who listens to Radio Anthrocide, there were a few surprises to go along with the obligatory Egg, Hatfield And The North, Caravan, and Soft Machine- those bands being, quite obviously, my very favorite Canterbury practitioners. As a note before my general comments- Yes, it is true, there was no National Health, Gong, Khan or Camel played on this particular inventory of Canterbury sounds. The reason is simple- I really don't care for those bands all that much. While I'm sure this is an outrage to some readers, all I can say is- it's my show, I play what I want. And I don't have a lot of time to waste trying to be all things to all people. So, sorry but...Camel is a band so lame even Richard Sinclair couldn't help them. That's really, really saying something.

Anyways, show highlights of obscure and little-known bands included Finnish saxophonist Eero Koivistoinen, whose 1973 album The Original Sin is a real gem of 70's Jazzrock. The title cut showcased definite Canterbury sensibilities, though on balance he's really not Canterbury. The same with Franch keyboardist Marc Moulin, who opened the last set of the evening with some really gorgeous quasi-improvisational Electronics, and The Muffins, who are more RIO than anything, but forced me to play them when I realized how solid a track "Hobart Got Burned" is- and it's pretty Jazzy. "Love Robots" from Belgian avant-popsters Cos probably was a stretch but...I just am enamored with that song. So there.

Next week there's going to be a really outrageous night of bizarre and maniacal music, most of which you're going to hate and you probably shouldn't tune in. However, if you do, I shall see you on Radio23.org at 8pm sharp, so...Cheers, - TKR

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

At Left: Klaus Schulze appeared on this show, from the tremendous album "Irrlicht". I basically just wanted to have any excuse to use this photo; it has to be one of the best Kosmische images ever. Check the TSR-80 in the background; that's 128k of pure computing power there, folks; no wonder Klaus sounded so good.

DJ Timothy has resolved to do several things in the coming months: One, begin the annoying habit of speaking in the Third Person (singular) in order to torment my detractors, and, Two, be more and more lazy in the putting together of shows. The reasons are two-fold: One, I really have been busy and simply don't have the energy to spend ten hours a week planning for a show that then takes a further four hours to do, and, Two, I've been getting so much positive feedback on these last two weeks' of shows that I'm thinking a serendipitous discovery in RA programming has been engendered by my indolent and languid slide into Prog Rock torpor. We'll see, but for these two shows...I had a lot of fun.

Thus, Saturday night's broadcast was, again, a mish-mosh or gallimaufry,if you will (a real word, I want to emphasize- click the link), of exciting sounds and circumstances, genres and beats, from Anatolian Psych to underground DC Funk to some stuff I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the world who is playing it on the Internets (which, of course, is the sole reason why RA exists in the first place; there's no need for RA in the market place of ideas if I just go do the same boring shit you can find on your FM radio dial). That long-winded and excessively-run-on-sentence bit of throat clearing aside, there are a few things that you might find interesting in Saturday's playlist; and certainly there were some interesting bands and musicians who were on the show.

Moscow DJ Ilya Richter's Dream Mechanics started the show with a trance-inducing bit of Electronica from the really quite excellent Screensaver album. "A Dream" is typical of an album that is in no way typical; I don't do a lot of "modern" Electronic music, but along with the brilliant Alexander Sobolev (who appeared later in the show with "Gidrophobia", my neighbor's favorite song from the RA archives) there does seem to be a burgeoning Russian Electro scene that I hope continues for a long time to come. The Dream Mechanics are unsigned, which I don't think matters all that much anymore, so long as people find out about their independent work through the magic of theInternets;so get the word out already, would you?

Now that I think of it, there were numerous bands of unique pedigree on RA#17. We heard from Witold Szczurek, from the absolutely beautiful album Basspace, and the sublime modern Jazz track "Fifteen Questions". He's another one I am making a project of; although it seems as if he has given in to the eternal American fear of consonant-loaded names and is now known as Vitold Rek; so if you're looking for his stuff, I suppose that's where you need to go now. Later, serious underground Funk from Richard Simms, a.k.a. Wicked Witch, made an appearance, along the spatial causeways of Funkadelic-by-way-of-Space-cocaine mix, with the super badass track "Fancy Dancer". Apparently, Simms- playing with an ongoing series of musicians live, but most of the music being strictly his own work- virtually owned Washington D.C. in the late 70's and early 80's; what happened to him next I have no idea. But it seems he took serious Cosmic Funk with him into gloaming obscurity; they just don't make music like this anymore, which is a crying fucking shame.

We also heard from what is fast becoming one of my favorite bands- the awesome Anatolian Psych sounds of the brothers Hurel, otherwise known as 3 Hur-El. This video from Turkish television from 1974 is where you want to start with these guys; I've been playing this over and over again for the past two weeks since I found it one insomnia-plagued night, and think it is just the cat's meow, baby. Guitarist Ferdinun Hurel-in addition to having an awesome beard- plays one of the meanest wah-guitars ever on his custom-built combination double-neck guitar and sez; I didn't even know what a sez was until I saw these guys, but I do now, and I love it. My friends Anthony Passonno and Dean Blake- who have a project together that they call Bird Flew-then brought a bit of pure malevolence to the proceedings with the daunting "Life Taking Life", a fourteen-minute dirge of violent and grim noise that I think is just great. Again, an unsigned band who do it all- recording, producing, you name it- and one that I just can't get over how professional sounding their music is. Other highlights of the show included another appearance from Slovak guitarist Radim Hladik's Blue Effect, playing first with Prague avant-Jazz group Jazz Q and then later with the epic track "New Synthesis 2" with the Czechoslovak Radio Jazz Orchestra. The former is just noise at its best; a cacophony that at times almost goes off the rails, the track "Conjuctio Part 1" from the Conjuctio album really is a show stopper; a serious epic at over nineteen minutes, when I first found this record I just was playing it over and over again, so blown away by all of these amazing musicians getting together for an album and somehow making it work. Sometimes too much talent is not a good thing;here though, the egos were subsumed and this particular album is definitely due for a place on the revised "Top Progressive Rock Albums Of All-Time", which partisans of RA should look for sometime early next year.

All right, enough of this endless ranting. Check those links and support those bands; they have the RA seal of approval, which no one probably cares about but is still the most exacting reward handed out by the music press. Because as anyone can tell you, I don't like anything. Except stuff that is good. See you Saturday, and Cheers, - TKR